More firms set to beef up travel budgets

Along with rising business confidence, as many as 31 percent of Chinese companies expect to increase their travel budgets over the next 12 months, surging from the 17 percent of respondents that predicted budget increases last year, a survey showed.

The 2017 China Business Travel Survey was published by the CITS (China International Travel Service) American Express Global Business Travel on Tuesday. It revealed that 40 percent of the polled organizations planned to expand their budgets to tap into the opportunities presented by the Belt and Road Initiative.

China became the country with the largest business travel expenditure of $317 billion in the world after overtaking the United States in 2016.